CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Question
A cloud architect is designing a multi-tier application on a public cloud. The application must be highly available and fault-tolerant within a single region. Which three items should be included in the architecture? (Select THREE.)
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Deploy resources in multiple availability zones
High availability within a region requires distributing resources across availability zones, using load balancers for traffic distribution, and implementing health checks for automatic failover.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy resources in multiple availability zones
Why this is correct
Spreading resources across multiple availability zones within one region gives fault isolation: a single zone failure leaves the application running elsewhere. This directly satisfies the stem's fault-tolerance and high-availability constraint while remaining inside a single region.
- ✓
Place a load balancer in front of the web tier
Why this is correct
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across healthy web-tier instances and reroutes around failures, eliminating the single point of failure. This satisfies the high-availability constraint by maintaining service when individual instances or an availability zone become unavailable.
- ✗
Use a single instance in one availability zone
Why it's wrong here
One instance in one availability zone places the workload in a single failure domain, so an AZ outage takes the application down with no failover target, contradicting fault tolerance within the region. It is tempting because single-instance deployment is inexpensive and adequate for dev, test or non-critical workloads.
- ✗
Use a single database instance without replication
Why it's wrong here
A single unreplicated database instance creates a single point of failure: if it or its host fails, the data tier is unavailable and no standby exists to fail over to, defeating fault tolerance within the region. It is tempting because a single instance is cheap and simple, and would suit a development or non-critical workload.
- ✓
Implement health checks for all instances
Why this is correct
Health checks continuously probe instance and service state, letting the load balancer or orchestrator remove unhealthy targets from rotation automatically. This satisfies the fault-tolerance requirement by ensuring traffic only reaches functioning instances, enabling self-healing within the region.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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